The book produced a strong and immediate effect.  As Culture and Anarchy first obtained for its author a hearing from politicians and social reformers, so St. Paul and Protestantism obtained him a hearing from clergymen, religious teachers, and amateurs of theology.  Dr. Vaughan, then just appointed Master of the Temple, was moved to preach a sermon,[47] pointing out—­what indeed was true enough—­that Arnold omitted from St. Paul’s teaching all reference to the Divine Pardon of Sin, or, as theologians would say, to the Atonement.  But on the other hand, Bishop Fraser seems to have approved.  “The question is,” wrote Arnold, “is the view propounded true?  I believe it is, and that it is important, because it places our use of the Bible and our employment of its language on a basis indestructibly solid.  The Bishop of Manchester told me it had been startlingly new to him, but the more he thought of it, the more he thought it was true."[48]

He himself was delighted with this success.  He hoped to exercise a “healing and reconciling influence” in the troubled times which he saw ahead; “and it is this which makes me glad to find—­what I find more and more—­that I have influence.”  He delighted in finding that the “May Meetings” abounded in comments on St. Paul and Protestantism.  “We shall see,” he exclaims gleefully, “great changes in the Dissenters before long.”  “The two things—­the position of the Dissenters and the right reading of St. Paul and the New Testament—­are closely connected; and I am convinced the general line I have taken as to the latter has a lucidity and inevitableness about it which will make it more and more prevail.”  The book soon reached a second edition, and he wrote thus about it to his friend Charles Kingsley:  “I must have the pleasure of sending you, as soon as it is reprinted, a little book called St. Paul and Protestantism, which the Liberals and physicists thoroughly dislike, but which I had great pleasure and profit in thinking out and writing.”

And now he was fairly embarked, for good or for evil, on his theological career.  He had exalted the Church of England as the historic Church in this land:  he had poured scorn on “hole-and-corner religions” of separatism; he had advised the Dissenters to submit to Episcopal government and return to the Church and strengthen its preaching power:  and he had re-stated, in terminology of his own, what he conceived to be St. Paul’s teaching on Religion.  This work was completed in 1870, and in 1871 he began to publish instalments of a book which appeared in 1873 under the title Literature and Dogma.  The scope and purpose of this book may best be given in his own words.  It deals with “the relation of Letters to Religion:  their effect upon dogma, and the consequences of this to religion.”  His object is “to reassure those who feel attachment to Christianity, to the Bible, and who recognize the growing discredit befalling miracles and the super-natural.”